“A gentleman prepared to pay very handsomely. He could see you in an hour.”
I hesitated. On the one hand I had Great-grandfather’s exploits. On the other hand was the lure of a Fabergé egg.
Fabergé won. Thieves have to eat and pay bills like anyone and I had recently bought a very snazzy dockside apartment.
I rather enjoyed that job. There were electronic sensors in the floor, so I used a simple block and tackle arrangement, which I slid along by means of a suspended pulley-wheel. I scooped the egg from its velvet bed, stashed it in the zipped pocket of my anorak, then wound the pulley back and hopped out through the window.
The client was a charming and cultured gentleman of complicated nationality and apparently limitless funds, and we celebrated the transaction liberally with vodka and caviar. After that we discussed Chekhov and explored the causes of the Russian Revolution until he fell off the chair while making a toast to the House of Romanov and had to be taken to the local A &E with a fractured wrist.
A &E were busy and we were there all night. But my client was polite and civilized during the whole time.
10 November 1918
We’re all being very polite and civilized during this journey, whatever its purpose might be. We’re even being civilized to the enemy – half an hour ago we were overtaken by a car carrying three Germans of unmistakable high rank. I didn’t panic until we came upon them a few hundred yards further along, parked on the roadside.
“They’ve got a puncture,” said the colonel in the back of my car, and told me to stop in case we could help.
“Are you mad, sir?” said the major next to him. “It’ll be a trick. They’ll shoot us like sitting ducks.”
“We’re all bound for the same place, you fool. There won’t be any shooting.”
I don’t pretend to much mechanical knowledge, but I can change a wheel with the best – although it felt strange to do so alongside a man with whose country we had been at war for four years. I expected a bullet to slam into my ribs at any minute, and I promise you I kept a heavy wrench near to hand. But we got the job done in half an hour, with our respective officers circling one another like cats squaring up for a fight.
I stowed the punctured wheel in the boot.
“Not too close to that case,” said the German driver, pointing to a small attaché case.
“Why? It hasn’t got a bomb in it, has it?”
“Oh, no,” he said, earnestly. He had better English than I had German.
“It contains a- I have not the word-” He gestured to his own left hand where he wore a signet ring.
“A ring? Signet ring?”
“Signet ring, ach, that is right.”
“From a lady?”
He glanced over his shoulder, and then, in a very low voice, he said, “From the Kaiser. I am not supposed to know, but I overhear… It’s for the signing of the Peace Treaty.”
I didn’t believe him. Would you? I didn’t believe a Peace Treaty was about to be signed, and even if it was, I didn’t believe Kaiser Bill would send his signet ring to seal the document. Nobody used sealing wax and signet rings any longer.
Or did they? Mightn’t an Emperor of the old Prussian Royal House do just that? In the face of defeat and the loss of his imperial crown, mightn’t he make that final arrogant gesture?
“So,” said the German driver, “it is to be well guarded, you see.”
I did see. I still didn’t entirely believe him, but I didn’t disbelieve him. So, when he got back into his car, I reached into that attaché case. I expected it to be locked and it was. But it was a flimsy lock – not what you’d expect of German efficiency – and it snapped open as easily as any lock I ever forced. No one was looking and I reached inside and took out a small square box, stamped with a coat of arms involving an eagle. I put the case quietly in my pocket, got back into the car, and drove on.
The present
Infuriatingly, the next few pages were badly damaged – by the look of them they had been shredded by industrious mice or even rats to make nests. I didn’t care if the Pied Piper himself had capered through that attic, calling up the entire rodent population of Hampstead as he went. I needed to know what came next.
Clearly Great-grandfather had driven high-ranking officials to that historic meeting in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest, at which the Armistice ending the Great War was signed. And on the very threshold of that iconic meeting, he had planned to go yomping off to some nameless château to liberate it of easily transportable loot! Carrying with him what might be Wilhelm II’s signet ring.
I carried the entire box of papers home, but after several hours poring over the disintegrated sections I gave up, and hoped I could pick up the thread in the pages that were still intact.
11 November 1918
Well! Talk about Avalon and Gramarye! I got into that château at dawn, and it was so easy they might as well have rolled out a welcome mat.
And if ever there was an Aladdin’s cave…
The family who owned it must have left very hastily indeed, because it didn’t look as if they taken much with them. The place was stuffed to the gunnels with silver and gold plate, paintings, furniture… But I kept to the rule I had made earlier and only took small objects. Salt cellars, sugar sifters, candle snuffers. Some Chinese jade figurines, and a pair of amber-studded snuff boxes. Beautiful and saleable, all of them. I thought – if I survive this war, I shall live like a lord on the proceeds of this.
And so I would have done if the military police hadn’t come chasing across the countryside. You’d have thought that with a Peace Treaty being signed – probably at that very hour – they’d overlook one soldier taking a few hours extra to return to his unit. But no, they must needs come bouncing and jolting across the countryside in one of their infernal jeeps.
I had the stolen objects in my haversack, and I ran like a fleeing hare. I had no clear idea where I was going and I didn’t much care, but I got as far as a stretch of churned-up landscape, clearly the site of a very recent battle. There were deep craters and a dreadful tumble of bodies lying like fractured dolls half-buried in mud. The MPs had abandoned their jeep, but I could see its lights cutting a swathe through the dying afternoon, like huge frog’s eyes searching for prey. Prey. Me.
The haversack was slowing me down, so eventually I dived into the nearest crater and lay as still as I could. It was a fairly safe bet they would find me, and probably I would get a week in the glass-house, but if they found the château loot I would get far worse than a week in the glass-house. And find it they would, unless I could hide it…
I’m not proud of what I did next. I can only say that war makes people do things they wouldn’t dream of in peacetime.
There were four dead men in that crater. I had no means of recognizing any of them, partly because they were so covered with mud and partly – well, explosives don’t make for tidy corpses. I chose the one who was least disfigured, and tipped the stash into the pockets of his battledress, buttoning up the flaps. He was a sergeant in a Lincolshire regiment. I memorized his serial number.
One last thing I did in those desperate minutes. I slipped the Kaiser’s signet ring out of its velvet box and put it on the man’s hand.
Then I stood up and walked towards the MPs, my hands raised in a rueful gesture of surrender.
I didn’t get a week in the glass-house. I didn’t even get forty-eight hours. Armistice was declared at eleven o’clock that morning, and four hours filched by a soldier who had driven the colonel to the signing of the Peace Treaty was overlooked.
And after the celebrations had calmed down, those of us who had survived had to bury the dead.
They say every story is allowed one coincidence and here’s mine. I was one of the party detailed to bury the bodies from the very battlefield where I had hidden. That Lincolnshire sergeant was where I had left him, lying in the mud, his jacket securely buttoned, the signet ring on the third finger of his right hand. I promise you, if I could have got at any of the stuff I would have done, but there were four of us on the task and I had no chance.